A Moss Adventure,
Chapter III - In Which Something Actually Happened
Chapter III - In Which Something Actually Happened
After god knows how many hiccups and hold ups it's finally done. I'll probably keep tweaking things and making some minor adjustments to the case and monitor in the next month or two, but for now it's up and running.
The Finished Product:
The Computer:
- AMD Phenom II X4 945
- Sapphire Radeon HD5770 1GB Vapor-X
- Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD4 Motherboard
- Corsair CMD4GX3M2A1600C8 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3
- Seasonic X-Series 650W Power Supply
- Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB
- ASUS SDRW-08D1S-U External Slim DVDRW Drive
- Perspex Tank
- Lian Li Removable Motherboard Tray
- Scythe Himuro Hard Drive Cooler
- Thermaltake P500 Pump
- Swiftech MCR420-QP Radiator
And a lot of extra cabling, pipes, barbs screws, nuts and bolts.
The Cost:
Final cost of the whole build is about $2000 AUD. Four hundred of which went into the mineral oil, tank, radiator, pump, and pipes. The cost of which could be greatly decreased if it was built for a more normal purpose, rather than the specific things I designed it for. An unexpectedly significant part of the cost was the mineral oil, although it's dirt cheap in America it costs around three times as much in Australia. It's essentially useless unless you have tonnes of it lying around you need to find a use for, so not really worth importing if you don't make it yourself.
My build isn't exactly a poster child for mineral oil cooled computers, it's neither as cheap or effective as it could be. Partly this is due to inexperience and caution leading me go overboard on parts of the build but also signifigantly because that wasn't my focus. I was aiming for reliability and simplicity. I think I've achieved that, but I guess time will tell.
For those with the time and patience, as far as projects like this go it was actually fairly simple to put together and despite the problems I had surprisingly fun. If you have spare parts and cash, want to build something, or are just plain curious I'd certainly recommend giving it a try.
Silent Media PC:
$80 Fish tank, or about the same custom built by a professional plastic worker.
$130 Mineral oil (Much less if you live in the real world).
Remove all fans, throw some decorations in and stick it on a shelf next to your TV. Using a solid state drive would up the cost by a significant amount, but would leave your computer almost completely silent.
Gaming PC:
$80 Fish tank, or about the same custom built by a professional plastic worker.
$70 pump.
$130 Mineral oil (Much less if you live in the real world).
$70 Radiator.
$20 Cheap 4pack of fans.
As far as cooling for high end overclocked rigs go it's relatively inexpensive. Then again, you'd be building a high end OC'd rig, so money probably isn't your biggest concern.
Performance:
I'm using a rather passive build, which means a slow pump to keep noise down and no fans on the radiator. All things considered though it seems like the computers doing fine as it is.
Several hours of gaming in a row leaves the GPU at around 58 degrees Celsius and the the CPU at around 53. Idle usage is around 45-50 for both after several hours. I've yet to really stress it with high end games (the most graphically intensive thing I've run so far has been Warbands, although I did have the graphics as high as possible and was fighting two hundred a side battles). If I get a request or two I'll do a stress test with 3DMark or whatever other benchmarking software I can find lying around to see how it holds up.
Pics, because it happened:
Sorry about the crappy quality, as you can see by the wire they're taken with my webcam.
The case:
Pics and Videos were taken of filling up the case and the antics and shenanigans that involved, but I still need to get that off my house mates camera.
Old Stuff:
Chapter II - In Which Something Actually Happens
Some of you may remember me posting a thread about this last year. The information in that thread is a little out of date, so I figured I'd start afresh.
Because of a medical condition I can't handle heated plastics or ozone (amongst other things). As you can probably guess, it makes using a computer a little bit of an issue, I have to use a respirator whenever I use a computer for anything longer than about fifteen minutes. So I'm building myself an airtight PC.
I finally have the money saved. I've gotten all of my other important projects out of the way. I have a month and a half before the first semester starts. It is as they say, go time.
The Design:
Having gone through several different concepts for the design I decided on the one which had the best balance of affordability, practicality and effectiveness. Basically I'm getting a perspex box made, which I'm then going to fill with horse laxative (also known as non-conductive mineral oil) to act as a heat sink for the components. The mineral oil has a high heat conductivity, so it'll be more than capable of taking the load. Hard drive will be mounted away from the oil and I'll use a portable USB DVD drive.
Because a pic is worth a thousand words:
*Note: Not to scale or shape. May have been made with MS Paint.
Red: Motherboard
Green: PSU
Yellow: Hard drive
Blue: Oil height
The motherboard is connected to the top of the perspex case, allowing for access to the ports, power supply cable and power switch are also through the top of the case, it's essentially a normal PC case flipped on it's side. I'll post an actual blueprint for the case once I've got all the measurements and have finalised everything (I need to draw one up for the perspex shaper anyway).
The Budget:
The budget is pretty loose. The card and monitor are going to set me back about $900 AU, the case between $250 and $300. I've got about $2000 on hand to spend. If necessary I can pay a small (i.e. $30) fee and get an advance on my scholarship of up to another $2000 (which I'll probably be doing anyway to pay for text books, my bond, etc at the start of the semester). Basically I can afford to spend up to $3000.
I'm all set to start ordering in the parts and getting everything ready for the first test runs. There's just one tiny little hitch. I don't actually know anything about hardware. I know what everything is, I can wire it all together, but I don't have any idea what the difference between types, brands, or what kind of difference there is between say, DDR2 and DDR3. So if anyone can give me any advice on what kind of components I should be using in this thing, I'd appreciate it.
The Parts:
Components:
Motherboard: ?
Processor: ?
RAM: ?
Hard drive: ?
PSU: ?
Graphics card: ?
Monitor: Second hand 20" Apple Cinema Display monitor. At $350 second hand it's almost the same cost as a good monitor! Aluminium case has no vents it simply uses the metal as a heat sink, no plastic on the outside to heat and no vents means I can use it as is.
For those curious about mineral oil cooling for PC's:
http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php
